Higher pay for adjuncts is goal of SUNY New Paltz protest

NEW PALTZ — Campus protests, once as reliably a part of springtime as daffodils, sunshine and keg parties, may be making a modest comeback at SUNY New Paltz this year.

BY JEREMIAH HORRIGAN

NEW PALTZ — Campus protests, once as reliably a part of springtime as daffodils, sunshine and keg parties, may be making a modest comeback at SUNY New Paltz this year.

Faculty and students are expected to help in a May Day national protest of what its organizer calls higher education's "dirty little secret:" the poverty-level wages of colleges' part-time and full-time nontenured lecturers.

Protest organizer Peter D.G. Brown, president of SUNY New Paltz's United University Professions union, said that at a number of local colleges, including Bard and Vassar, teaching and labor unions and student groups are committed to demanding that adjuncts and nontenured faculty receive $5,000 per course.

"Colleges — including New Paltz — have been crying the blues for years when it's come these salaries. They say they don't have the money. But they always have the money for 20 to 30 tenured positions," said Brown. "They always say they're paying market value — I say, let's raise the market value."

SUNY New Paltz pays its 185 adjunct teachers $3,000 per three-credit course, he said. The college also employs 65 full-time lecturers who are required by the college to teach five courses per semester at a fixed rate of $4,000 per course.

A request for comment from the college was not returned Wednesday.

Brown said the average national adjunct pay is $2,700 per course, with some schools paying as much as $7,000 per course.

Shelly Wright, chief of staff to college President Don Christian, said in a statement that the college wouldn't comment publicly while a tentative state contract with the UUP awaits ratification.